The present invention relates to a semiconductor production system and more particularly to a semiconductor production system linking a semiconductor manufacturing apparatus, an inspection apparatus and a storage device by using a storage area network.
A commonly used communication means for interconnecting apparatus is a LAN (local area network) described, for example, in Japanese Patent Unexamined Publication No. 2000-164667. Another system is also known which, as disclosed in Japanese Patent Unexamined Publication No. 9-153441 (corresponding to U.S. Pat. No. 5,867,389), divides a LAN into a plurality of segments and installs a processing station between the divided segments to copy data.
The storage area network is an independent network which is constructed of only storages, devices for storing data, by separating the storages from a server. Examples of such storage area networks include those networks based on such links as a fiber channel (one of serial interface standards) described in WO 00/18049 and WO 00/17769 and an optical fiber described in WO 00/2954. The storage area network is a general term for networks that link storage devices independently of the kind of communication devices used. A link of storage devices through a serial bus as defined in IEEE1394 and a link of storage devices through a switched bus as defined by InfiniBand (registered trade name) are storage area networks. However, Ethernet which handles storage protocol, such as iSCSI (registered trade name) and SEP (SCSI Encapsulation Protocol), is the storage area networks.
An object of the present invention is to provide a semiconductor production system capable of transferring at high speed and storing a large volume of image data or design data.
Another object of the present invention is provide a semiconductor production system capable of linking various information in the semiconductor production system via network to improve system throughput.
In the conventional technologies described above, because two kinds of data, namely a large volume of CAD data representing design information on semiconductors and semiconductor masks and message data representing control commands for controlling and linking a variety of devices are transferred on the same network without considering the kind of data flowing through the network, traffic inevitably increases, degrading the performance of the network, which in turn adversely affects the overall performance of the system. That is, the conventional networks have a problem that the throughput of the networks changes according to the frequency of issuing the control command, the frequency of generating a response to the command and the transmission/reception of a large volume of data such as image data, thus degrading the overall performance of the apparatus. As the advance of the micro-fabrication technology in particular drastically increases the volumes of the image data obtained as a result of inspection and of the CAD data representing the design information on semiconductors and masks, the band of the network is occupied by simply communicating these data. This adversely affects the transmission and reception of message data.
There is a technique that divides a LAN into a plurality of segments and installs processing stations between the segments to perform copying of data to alleviate the traffic. In this case, however, because the processing stations copy data between the segments, the processing stations themselves become a bottleneck of the overall performance of the system. For example, if the inspection apparatus and manufacturing apparatus are connected together via network, data must be copied via network in order to transfer data between these apparatus, thus crowding the network and lowering the throughput of the system as a whole. Further, it is also necessary to copy data between storage devices connected to individual segments and this makes the consistency management of copied data complicated.
The present invention has been accomplished in light of the above-described problems.
To solve the problems above, the present invention adopts the following means.
A semiconductor production system comprises: a semiconductor manufacturing apparatus having an exposure unit, a control unit for controlling the exposure unit and a storage device; a semiconductor inspection apparatus having an observation unit, a control unit for controlling the observation unit and a storage device; and a storage device commonly used by the semiconductor manufacturing apparatus and the semiconductor inspection apparatus; wherein the semiconductor manufacturing apparatus, the semiconductor inspection apparatus and the commonly used storage device are linked together via a storage area network. The semiconductor manufacturing apparatus can be used as an apparatus for making masks for fabricating semiconductors.
As described above, with this invention because the semiconductor manufacturing apparatus or storage devices are linked together via the storage area network, a large volume of image data or design data can be transferred at high speed, improving the system throughput.